Lab Bees Would Rather Play Ball Than Eat

Give a bumble bee a clear path to food and a pile of small wooden balls, and apparently a significant number of bumble bees will choose the balls.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London watched 45 bumble bees roll wooden balls repeatedly with no reward on offer: no food, no mating advantage, no obvious payoff. One bee rolled 117 times. Younger bees rolled more than older ones. Males went at it longer than females. The pattern matches what you see in juvenile mammals: the young play more, the old less, the males push it further. The behavior checked every scientific box for play.

Insects have never been documented playing with objects before. Not once.

The implication is uncomfortable for anyone who assumed that play required a more substantial brain than a bumble bee is running. Bumble bees have brains roughly the size of a sesame seed. They were supposed to be biological automatons, about as inner-life-having as a stapler: find flower, collect pollen, return to hive, repeat.

And yet. One hundred and seventeen times.

The study, published in Animal Behaviour, doesn't claim bees are sentient. What it does say is that whatever is happening inside a bumble bee brain during ball-rolling, it looks a lot more like joy than anyone expected. What exactly that experience is, nobody is ready to say yet.

Happy World Bee Day.

Read the full story at Science, October 27, 2022

Hot Take: If the bees had phones, they'd be playing Flower or Bejeweled. The youngest ones would have the highest scores.